As Singapore’s independence day approached amidst the backdrop of the pandemic, organizations across the country wanted to celebrate in a way that was socially responsible.
One of these organizations was the Taman Jurong Citizens Consultative Committee (CCC).
Each year, Taman Jurong CCC organizes a large-scale national day event, bringing in residents from the precinct to commemorate the day. While an in-person event was out of the question this year, the organization still wanted to bring the community together.
They decided to make the celebrations virtual. And, in place of a single in-person event, the agenda was made up of 5 interactive virtual events happening at the same time, all of which were separately live streamed.
Here’s the full story on how they turned that vision into a reality with the help of automation.
An Early Hurdle that Called for Automation
Initially, the team planned to host the events in separate breakout rooms in Zoom and simultaneously broadcast them on individual Zoom meetings. However, as the number of registrations began to pour in, Taman Jurong CCC’s team of volunteers had to:
- Clean up registrant data
- Assign registrants to the correct event
- Provide registrants with the info they need
As the organization’s team of volunteers had little bandwidth already, these tasks were simply unfeasible.
That’s when Jiaying Lee, a volunteer at the organization since 2007, and our resident marketing operations wizard, decided that Workato could automate the process.
“It was a no-brainer. Our customers turn to automation to solve this for their webinars, so I knew we could address this ourselves with two recipes, max.”
Note: A recipe is a set of steps that Workato follows to get work done between your apps.
How the Automation Works
When Lee told Allan Teng, our Regional Managing Director and VP, about the challenge and his solution, Teng immediately agreed. He gave Lee the go ahead to sponsor the organization’s use of Workato, explaining that:
“Being part of the community myself, I know how important events like these are for the organization and the wider community.”
Lee built an automated workflow that was designed to perform multiple tasks seamlessly.
First, it collected the list of attendees who had registered for an event on Form.Gov.sg, the government portal that Taman Jurong CCC used. This triggered a workflow where participants were automatically assigned to the appropriate Zoom meeting or webinar (for the livestream experience). Also, the registrants’ data was uploaded onto a Google Sheet, along with the event or zoom meetings they signed up for. From there, the volunteers could easily assign each registrant to the appropriate breakout room.
Following the event, another recipe extracted the attendee report generated by Zoom and compared it to the original registration list to get an enriched view of their attendees. Through this view, the organization was able to deem which attendees qualified for their giveaway.
A Better Experience for Volunteers and Participants
Lee estimates that without Workato, it would have taken two minutes to manually register each person.
Given that there were close to a thousand registrants, that would have come out to 33 hours! And that’s not accounting for the time they’d have to take to correct all of the inevitable errors that come from performing such a massive, manual undertaking.
In contrast, designing, setting up, testing, and going live with the workflow was easy, painless, and took just a couple hours. Lee further explained how it’s benefited the organization:
“The volunteers can dedicate the hours of time they’ve saved toward other tasks that help them prepare for the big day.”
The participants also benefited. The automation allowed the organization to include all of the event info in a single email, effectively preventing participants from receiving several touchpoints. And, on the day itself, it only took participants one click to kick off their national day celebrations.
Feeling inspired to build your own automations around Zoom? Learn how marketing, HR, and sales teams can each leverage Zoom automations!
